The Least British Shakespeare

A new book argues that every other country is better at bringing his plays to life.

April 20, 2016

In the
summer of 2012, the English journalist Andrew Dickson sat down to watch the
Olympic opening ceremony on TV from his London apartment. The Danny
Boyle-helmed spectacle, titled “Isles of Wonder,” was supposed to be
Shakespeare-themed, yet it opened with a rural panorama of Brit kitsch:
maypoles, cricket, rugby, “Danny Boy.” Then, just a few minutes in, the veteran
actor Kenneth Branagh appeared amid a phalanx of iconic London stagecoaches
dressed as the nineteenth-century civil engineer Isambard Brunel. To the music
of Edward Elgar, Branagh recited Caliban’s famous “Be not afeard” speech from The
Tempest. Dickson dryly remarks:

Words spoken by an oppressed and imprisoned slave, Caliban, in a
play, The Tempest, that dwells at length on the costs and consequences
of colonialism, were being repurposed as a eulogy for the British Empire,
placed above music by Edwardian England’s most patriotic composer and replayed
for the watching world.

Dickson
wonders how on earth the British acquired such a “curious, conflicted attitude”
to their National Poet—how they became so uncritical that the irony of choosing
Caliban’s speech to celebrate the British Empire was apparently lost on the
organizers.

Earlier that summer, Dickson says, he’d seen The Comedy of
Errors performed by the Afghan theatre company Rah-e-Sabz, whose space at
the British Council in Kabul had been destroyed a year earlier in a suicide
bombing. It was an eye-opener for Dickson: An itinerant group of Afghans
transformed Shakespeare’s “creaky and mechanistic farce” into a rueful
meditation on exile and separation. And then here come the British, quoting The
Tempest in imperialist regalia, broadcasting their National Bard to
millions of viewers across the globe. Where the Afghan interpretation revealed
the urgency and universality of Shakespeare, the British wielded him like some cultural
prop, designed to reflect what is significant about Great Britain. Of the many
things wrong with this spectacle, Dickson writes, the most obvious one is that
“there was never anything especially British about William Shakespeare.”

Dickson’s remark comes just a few pages into Worlds Elsewhere:
Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe, his globe-trotting cultural history,
and it sets the tone for what is an exhaustive, and often exhausting,
exploration of how “Shakespeare went global.” In a series of spirited accounts,
Dickson traces the transmutations of Shakespeare’s plays across national and
cultural borders. He journeys to Gdańsk to witness the unveiling of a new
Shakespeare theatre; through centuries of German history, where Shakespeare has
repeatedly been claimed as an essentially German writer; to the American
frontier, where Richard III and Julius Caesar were staples among gold-mining
pioneers; to the spangled film industry of Mumbai, where Shakespearean dramas
are disassembled and raided for their plot; to apartheid-era South Africa,
where Shakespeare passed like samizdat between political prisoners on Robben
Island (including Nelson Mandela); and finally to Maoist China, where “Shashibiya”
(the Chinese name for Shakespeare) was condemned as an anti-revolutionary
influence. Dickson shows us the many ways in which Shakespeare repeatedly
thwarts geographical, linguistic, and political barriers—how little, in
historical terms, he belongs to any single culture or nation.

Dickson, a broadcaster and features journalist, charges fearlessly
through centuries of scholarship and history. He meets and interviews a
who’s-who of international academics and experts, as well as accomplished
filmmakers and fledgling dance troupes. At times, it must be said, the search
for Shakespeare seems indistinguishable from the lifestyle of a peripatetic fine
art dealer. Dickson pops up at various private receptions, museums and arts
festivals, enjoys a post-flight drink on a hotel roof bar in Mumbai, and mingles
with a group of festivalgoers at a throbbing nightclub in central Taipei. There
is frequent talk of being jetlagged.

Worlds Elsewhere is cheerily lighthearted in tone, and part of its pleasure lies
in its commitment to stories of wide-eyed eccentrics and enthusiasts. Along the
way, we encounter Henry Clay Folger, the first president of Standard Oil New
York, who along with his wife Emily became a compulsive collector of
Shakespeareana, accumulating the world’s largest collection of First Folios
(“Perhaps needless to say, they remained childless,” Dickson dryly remarks). We
meet Delia Bacon, author of The
Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857), one of the founders
of the Shakespearean authorship conspiracy—a phenomenon Dickson provocatively
argues was “largely an American invention,” foolishly encouraged by the likes
of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman.

In many of these instances Dickson
is unexpectedly reminded of what attracts people to Shakespeare—the way in
which he becomes a writer of urgency to American pioneers or postcolonial Indian
filmmakers. His dramas of exile and loss, power and ambition, prove especially
popular in these former colonies, where national and cultural identity is still
mutable. What was a lump of idolatry in the hands of the British suddenly
quickens with fluid relevance.

But it’s also true that a revitalized, reinterpreted Shakespeare
is not always a force for good. Shakespeare seems to “creep up in German
history whenever there is a change,” the scholar Ruth von Ledebur tells Dickson
during a visit in Munich. The most ominous of those changes is the rise of the
National Socialist Party, and the subsequent “grim proximity” of culture and
barbarism in the Third Reich—a proximity pointedly encapsulated by the phrase Buchenwald
liegt bei Weimar (“Buchenwald lies near Weimar”). Even the Nazis, it seems,
wanted to claim Shakespeare for themselves: In the 1930s they gradually
subsumed the venerable German Shakespeare Society, turning its yearbook into a
venue for crackpot theories about Shakespeare’s commitment to racial purity and
eugenics. Gradually, the society’s remaining Jewish members were forced to
resign. Among them was the playwright Ludwig Fulda, who in 1939 was denied a
visa to the United States. He killed himself not long thereafter.

But, for all the wealth of historical anecdote it gathers, Worlds
Elsewhere is an unwieldy, infuriating thing. With a look, perhaps, to Geoff
Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage,Dickson figures too fully in his own
narrative, and wants to discharge his discoveries on a jet stream of rambling,
discursive comedy. Dickson reveals a disconcerting appetite for hyperbole and
Martin Amisisms. The Washington Monument is “cool white against a
bouillabaisse-coloured sky”; San Francisco is “pimpled with theatres,” while
the Library of Congress is “crowned with a squat pimple of a dome.” When he
isn’t straining for high literary effect (his prose bristles with a thousand
unnecessary adjectives), Dickson unleashes a heap of noir-like clichés: “Before
I lit out for the Nevada foothills in pursuit of the actors, I had a date”; “It
wasn’t until I stumbled across a slim pamphlet that the pieces began to slot
into place”; “Something told me he would make it to the White House.” Is
Philip Marlowe doing the audiobook?

Dickson arrives at a Shakespeare as smoothly global, as complacently universal, as an
airport bar.

At some point I began to wonder how Shakespeare fits into all
this, except as a kind of ghost on the periphery. The most affecting parts
of the book certainly have little to do with him. There’s a very moving and
informative account of the life of Solomon Plaatje, the South African linguist
and civil rights activist, who undertook to translate The Comedy of Errors and Julius
Caesar into Tswana, and who quotes (once) from King Lear in his book Native
Life in South Africa (1916). Eventually even Dickson concedes that
Shakespeare is, at best, only marginally relevant to Plaatje’s story: “Plaatje’s
Shakespeare translations weren’t really about Shakespeare at all. Shakespeare
was being hitched to a much braver ideal: saving an entire culture.”

Shakespeare’s influence becomes more and more intangible as the
book goes on, leading Dickson to extend, or modify, the notion of Shakespeare’s
“benign universality”—his appeal to our “common humanity”—that he began with.
It might be more accurate, he decides, to “describe him as a Rorschach blot that
never looked the same twice,” or possibly even as a “multinational brand, a
free-floating symbol that transcended national borders and could attach itself
to many different kinds of cultural artifacts.” A little while later, sitting
at a French wine bar in Hong Kong, he muses on themes of travel and migration—applauding
Shakespeare for his receptiveness and curiosity, his flexibility and porousness.
Then, exhausted, he flicks “a wad of Hong Kong dollars on to the counter and
slid, somewhat unsteadily, off my stool. Time to think about going home.” The
gesture is woefully blasé. And yet it seems appropriate to the spirit of Worlds Elsewhere that Dickson, by way of
the Third Reich, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and Apartheid South Africa, should finally
arrive at a Shakespeare as smoothly global, as complacently universal, as an
airport bar. Benign universality indeed.

Dickson’s Shakespeare is indeed a writer of benign universality,
but only if by universality you mean appeal. Dickson imagines he can explain
Shakespeare by identifying this appeal, the infinite mutations and interpretations.
In order to avoid conflating this with greatness (because greatness implies a
value judgment) Shakespeare is praised for his mutability, the ease with which
he can be reconfigured to accommodate the needs of different countries,
languages, and historical circumstances. Additionally, it absolves Shakespeare from
being “a reliable piece of colonial equipment.”

Worlds
Elsewhere ends up inadvertently legitimizing the imperialist Shakespeare it
set out to dissolve.

Such an argument, if you can call it that, has the luxury of being
untethered to the knotty intricacies of text. Dickson, as he jets around the
world, never pauses to do any close reading—Shakespeare’s texts, in Worlds Elsewhere, are not really
important at all. Thus Hamlet “works
equally well” as “a Goethean Bildungsroman, as a Parsi-influenced Hindi movie,
a Wild West swashbuckler as well as a deconstructed piece of Regietheater.” But surely it is possible
to guard oneself against the notion of an “essential” Shakespeare, rigid with interpretational
fixity, without thereby accepting the idea that the value of Shakespeare’s
plays are merely the sum of their various interpretations, transformations, and
performances. If they can mean everything they mean nothing.

There is an irony here: Worlds
Elsewhere ends up inadvertently legitimizing the imperialist Shakespeare it
set out to dissolve. For if Shakespeare is both anti-apartheid activist and
American pioneer, then why not also the bard of British colonialism?—or, for
that matter, a Nazi eugenicist? And if all these interpretations are
representative of Shakespeare’s global appeal—if he is merely an instrument we
use to create cultural meaning, as the literary theorist Terence Hawkes argued—then
why do we keep returning to him and
not, say, Dante or Cervantes or Scheherazade?

Answering these questions would mean
treating Shakespeare as a writer, and not merely a global brand. It would mean identifying
literary qualities, not just cultural mileage. It would mean accepting that
although Shakespeare is “one storyteller among many,” his popularity and appeal
cannot be explained by culture, politics, or geography alone.

Morten Høi Jensen is a writer from Copenhagen, Denmark. He has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon.com, and Bookforum, and is currently writing a biography of the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen. He lives in New York City.